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We observe a strange phenomenon that does not only affect America but currently looks especially virulent in this country. (Before the fall of the Soviet empire, it was more noticeable in Europe.) When an election is coming, each of the two main competing sides shouts that if the other 50% (plus 1% or whatever) wins, .. MORE
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Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
While trying to make an analogy for a smartphone review, the technology reviewer and journalist Marques Brownlee once made the following observation about the Porsche 911: Have you ever listened to a car reviewer describe the latest generation Porsche 911? This is a car that’s looked more or less the same for the past fifty .. MORE
Economic Growth
Juliette Sellgren, a senior and economics major at the University of Virginia, has a podcast titled “The Great Antidote.” In October, she interviewed me about the winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics: Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson. She contacted me because I wrote, as I have done in most years since .. MORE
Cost-benefit Analysis
An article on a highway project in the Pacific Northwest caught my eye: However, the shiny new document leaves out an essential consideration when it comes to projecting the future effects of I-5 expansion in this long-constrained corridor, an omission that would have been much less noticed in a decade ago but which sticks out .. MORE
Energy, Environment, Resources
Subsidies and Tech Deals Don’t Change the Economics of Nuclear Power by David Kemp, Cato at Liberty, November 4, 2020. Excerpt: Despite the flurry of attention, nothing suggests that the underlying economics of nuclear have changed. Nuclear remains expensive, and its costs likely outweigh its benefits as a zero-carbon energy source. A recent Washington Post editorial, drawing .. MORE
Finance: stocks, options, etc.
A throwaway comment at the end of my previous post may have been misunderstood. So today I’ll provide a more complete interpretation of the market response to the recent election. There were a number of significant market responses to the election, including: 1. Significantly higher stock prices2. A stronger dollar3. Higher interest rates4. Higher inflation .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
The 20th century produced fictional dystopias besides real ones, yet the best known – like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – originated in liberal democracies. All, however, owe much to a novel from one from one of the real dystopias, We, by the Soviet Union’s Yevgeny Zamyatin. Born in 1887, Zamyatin became a Bolshevik while a .. MORE
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The 20th century produced fictional dystopias besides real ones, yet the best known – like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – originated in liberal democracies. All, however, owe much to a novel from one from one of the real dystopias, We, by the Soviet Union’s Yevgeny Zamyatin. Born in 1887, Zamyatin became a Bolshevik while a .. MORE
Economic History
Art Carden has written a terrific article this morning on the huge economic progress we have made in the last 2 centuries. It’s “Conceived in Liberty or Conceived in Sin? Exploitation and Modern Prosperity,” Econlib, November 4, 2024. One excerpt: We are R.I.C.H.: Rich, Interconnected, Civilized, and Healthy. What does this mean? First, I’m referring .. MORE
Price Controls
I suspect regular readers of this blog are familiar with what basic economics tells us we can expect to see as a result of price controls. Let’s say that for some good, there is a large positive demand shock or negative supply shock, or both. This shifts the demand curve to the right, or supply .. MORE
A Book Review of Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, by Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze.1 Liberties, Thomas Hobbes wrote, “depend on the silence of the law.” Nowadays the law is very chatty. Here are three examples from the new book by Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze, Over Ruled: .. MORE
A Book Review of The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, by Joseph E. Stiglitz.1 Introduction Columbia University economics professor Joseph E. Stiglitz has recently published a book titled The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society. In it, Stiglitz, who shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics with George Akerlof and .. MORE
What is Humanomics?1 It sounds like a combination of human and economics. And indeed this book by Vernon Smith and Bart Wilson can be read as an attempt to reintroduce the human component into economics. It can be read as a criticism of modern economics and as the presentation of a substitute for it. It .. MORE
Book Review of Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, by Michael Lewis1 and Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson.2 Economists don’t find people all that interesting. Many of us have friends and family, but our models and analysis are devoid of personality and character. We talk about principles and agents, about the .. MORE
We are in the 21C so those who wish to cite reasons of implementation of min wage way way back provide nothing by so stating as it has to do with min wage in the..
SK, November 2